31st.  Rev. Thomas Hulbert, of the Pic, on the north shores of Lake Superior, writes about the orthography and principles of the Indian languages.  When this gentleman was on his way inland, he stopped at my house, and evinced much interest in the oral traditions of the Indians, as shown in Algic Researches, and presented me the conjugation of the Indian verb “to see,” filling many pages of an old folio account book—­all written in the wretched system of notation of Mr. Evans.[94] I stated to him the analytical mode which I had pursued in my lectures on the structure of the languages, with the very best helps at St. Mary’s; and that I had found it to yield to this process—­that the Algonquin was, in fact, an aggregation of monasyllabic roots:  that words and expressions were formed entirely of a limited number of original roots and particles, which had generic meanings.  That new words, however compounded, carried these meanings to the Indian ear, and were understood by it in all possible forms of accretion and syllabication.  That the derivatives founded on these roots of one or two syllables, could all be taken apart and put together like a piece of machinery.  That the principles were fixed, philosophical, and regular, and that, although the language had some glaring defects, as the want of a feminine pronoun, and many redundancies, they were admirably adapted to describe geographical and meteorological scenes.  That it was a language of woods and wilds.  That it failed to convey knowledge, only because it had apparently never been applied to it.  And that those philologists who had represented it as an agglutinated mass, and capable of the most recondite, pronominal, and tensal meanings, exceeding those of Greece and Rome, had no clear conceptions of what they were speaking of.  That its principles are not, in fact, polysynthetic, but on the contrary unasynthetic:  its rules were all of one piece.  That, in fine, we should never get at the truth till we pulled down the, erroneous fabric of the extreme polysynthesists, which was erected on materials furnished by an excellent, but entirely unlearned missionary.  But that this could not be done now, such was the prestige of names; and that he and I, and all humble laborers in the field, must wait to submit our views till time had opened a favorable door for us.  It was our present duty to accumulate facts, not to set up new theories, nor aim, by any means, to fight these intellectual giants while we were armed but with small weapons.

[Footnote 94:  A Wesleyan missionary, some time at Port Sarnia, opposite Fort Gratiot, Canada.]

Mr. Hurlbut entered into these views.  He had now reflected upon them, and he made some suggestions of philological value.  He was an apt learner of the language, as spoken north of the basin of Lake Superior.